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The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
page 76 of 594 (12%)
scholarship. Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare -- Kant
ranked as a law-giver above Plato. All serious scholars were
obliged to become German, for German thought was revolutionizing
criticism. Lowell had followed the rest, not very
enthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and invited his
scholars to join him. Adams was glad to accept the invitation,
rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than Germany, but still
in perfect good faith. It was the first serious attempt he had
made to direct his own education, and he was sure of getting some
education out of it; not perhaps anything that he expected, but
at least a path.

Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was
open to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen every
stage of his coming life, and he would probably have done worse.
The preliminary step was pure gain. James Russell Lowell had
brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its
universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him
privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to
read a little, and to talk a great deal, for the personal contact
pleased and flattered him, as that of older men ought to flatter
and please the young even when they altogether exaggerate its
value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As practical a
New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord faith rather
than towards Boston where he properly belonged; for Concord, in
the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure light. Adams approached
it in much the same spirit as he would have entered a Gothic
Cathedral, for he well knew that the priests regarded him as only
a worm. To the Concord Church all Adamses were minds of dust and
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